PAINTERS OF MODERN LIFE PART II

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present Painters of Modern Life, Part II, curated by Katharine Kostyál opening at Casa Cardinale, Calle Soledat 3a, Dalt Vila (Ibiza Old Town) 07800.

June 28 - June 30, 2024

T. S. Eliot’s poem, Preludes, 1910, which anticipated his much longer opus The Waste Land, is a profound meditation on the drudgery and loneliness Eliot perceived to be inherent in modern city life. It feels ever more prescient today.

Urban society, the poem suggests, isolates people from one another, threatening to erase their individuality and even erode human morality itself, an overwhelming preoccupation at the turn of the last century.

Adapting its title from Baudelaire’s immortal musings on the life of the flâneur, this exhibition will look at how these artists, each in their distinctly poetic ways and over a century after Eliot penned his poem, offer perhaps a contemplative palliative to this dystopian vision, touching upon the struggle for authentic living and the search for meaning in and escape from our modern lives, seen both from within the urban sprawl and the alienating digital technocracy of our present.

These artists’ chosen medium is painting, or a riff on the same, the language of which is becoming ever more elastic, generous and relevant as a uniquely analogue, solitary and salvatory pursuit.